05.27.08
Something to look forward to
dday writes in Political Animal:
There was a hint last November that Scott McClellan’s memoir was going to be unrelenting on George Bush, Karl Rove and the gang, but that was quickly dismissed as overhyped. The book is now on the verge of being released, and in fact was on sale over the weekend at D.C.-area bookstores. So Mike Allen picked up a copy, and the revelations appear to be as originally advertised:
Among the most explosive revelations in the 341-page book, titled What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception (Public Affairs, $27.95):McClellan charges that Bush relied on “propaganda” to sell the war.
He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.
He admits that some of his own assertions from the briefing room podium turned out to be “badly misguided.”
The longtime Bush loyalist also suggests that two top aides held a secret West Wing meeting to get their story straight about the CIA leak case at a time when federal prosecutors were after them – and McClellan was continuing to defend them despite mounting evidence they had not given him all the facts.
McClellan asserts that the aides – Karl Rove, the president’s senior adviser, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff – “had at best misled” him about their role in the disclosure of former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
This could be cherry-picking as well for the sake of selling some hardcovers. But that’s not a phenomenon that will be limited to Scott McClellan (and who knew he had this in him, huh?). The spate of memoirs that always roll out near the end of an Administration will take on an even greater “every-man-for-himself” quality in this one. From the lowest-level staffer to his personal food-taster, Bush will see half of his underlings or more trash him to every publisher in the country. If someone like McClellan, who was at Bush’s side from the Texas days, is willing to go nuclear to preserve his own reputation, it’ll be a free-for-all.
UPDATE: More on the book and its content.
The FEC
Interesting article by Craig Holman on the Watchdog Blog:
In a major victory for those who believe in free and fair elections, Hans von Spakovsky – a Republican nominee for commissioner on the nation’s elections agency – has withdrawn his nomination. Von Spakovsky’s nomination has been so contentious and volatile that it shut down the Federal Election Commission (FEC) since January. Now that he is gone, Congress can begin moving ahead and quickly reinstate the agency as we enter the second half of the election season.
As four seats of the six-member FEC expired this year, Hans von Spakovsky was nominated to fill one of the Republican slots, along with three other nominees.
But in an unprecedented five-page, single-spaced letter sent to the Senate Rules Committee, several top former career officials in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Voting Section complained about von Spakovsky’s service there as a political appointee, stating that he sought to undermine voting rights for partisan reasons. Von Spakovsky was instrumental in providing pre-clearance to a discriminatory voter ID requirement in Georgia. He also blocked a U.S. Attorney’s attempt to investigate a Minnesota rule that prevented American Indians who did not live on reservations from using tribal IDs as voter identification, and he supported Tom DeLay’s partisan redistricting in Texas. About half of the career lawyers in the Voting Section, some serving as long as 20 years in the office, left the Section under von Spakovsky’s watch.
Senate Democrats refused to seat von Spakovsky. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to nominate anyone else. The stalemate shut down the agency on January 1.
For McConnell, this was a “win-win” situation. He supported von Spakovsky and his disenfranchisement campaign; and McConnell has openly denounced important campaign finance laws. So, shutting down the FEC was perfectly fine for him.
Until, of course, Republican presidential candidate John McCain needed the FEC to certify $85 million in public funds for his general election campaign in order to stay anywhere close to the fundraising levels of the Democratic nominee. Without those funds, McCain would be badly outspent by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Much to the chagrin of McConnell, the FEC stalemate was shooting the Republican party in the foot.
Massive Federal US climate change report
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) today released “Synthesis and Assessment Product 4.3 (SAP 4.3): The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States.” The CCSP integrates the federal research efforts of 13 agencies on climate and global change. Today’s report is one of the most extensive examinations of climate impacts on U.S. ecosystems. USDA is the lead agency for this report and coordinated its production as part of its commitment to CCSP.
“The report issued today provides practical information that will help land owners and resource managers make better decisions to address the risks of climate change,” said Agriculture Chief Economist Joe Glauber.
The report was written by 38 authors from the universities, national laboratories, non-governmental organizations, and federal service. The report underwent expert peer review by 14 scientists through a Federal Advisory Committee formed by the USDA. The National Center for Atmospheric Research also coordinated in the production of the report. It is posted on the CCSP Web site.
The report finds that climate change is already affecting U.S. water resources, agriculture, land resources, and biodiversity, and will continue to do so. Specific findings include:
Will Canada sway the US Supreme Court?
Excellent article by Aziz Huq, who directs the liberty and national security project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the co-author, with Fritz Schwartz, of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror. He has written for New York Law Journal, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. His article begins:
At the end of June, the Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling on the challenge filed by Guantánamo detainees to their detention and the denial of habeas corpus. All the current presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have discussed their intention to close the offshore detention facility Guantanamo’s continuing damage to America’s global reputation figures prominently in their calculations.
Last week brought new confirmation of that damage with a Canadian Supreme Court judgment in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen detained at the Cuban base (pdf).
This decision raises intriguing questions. Coming just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is to rule, will it influence the high court’s decision? Should it?The Canadian judgment is indeed relevant, though it does not speak directly to questions the U.S. court must address: the detainees’ access to habeas corpus review and the constitutionality of their detention. Nonetheless, the Canadian decision illuminates the policy and moral stakes of the coming US decision.
At first glance, the Canadian decision appears to be reasoned carelessly. On close examination, however, it proves a powerful commentary on Guantánamo. It provides a subtle and telling gloss on the U.S. decisions — and the administration’s responses to those decisions. By highlighting the human rights implications of earlier U.S. court decisions, the Canadian court has indicated how one might frame a response to the continuing international problems created by the base. Taking a lead from the Canadian court, the U.S. courts and the administration could well decide that sunlight, and a full factual accounting, is the best way to resolve the reputational deficit recognized by the presidential candidates.
Some brief background about the Canadian decision first.
Why we know less than ever about the world
Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, talks about why — though we want to know more about the world than ever — the US media is actually showing less. Eye-opening stats and graphs. 4.5 minutes. Watch.
Peak oil is here
At least, it seems so. Consider this story by Hazrat Amin in myCrescent, an Islamic newspaper in the US, currently focused on Dallas:
“The prices that we’re paying at the pump today are, I think, going to be ‘the good old days,’ because others who watch this very closely forecast that we’re going to be hitting $12 and $15 a gallon, and then, after that, when world oil production goes into decline, we’re going to talk about rationing,” said Robert Hirsch, Management Information Services Senior Energy Advisor, talking to CNBC. He noted that along with significant rise in oil prices, consumers will see shortages including not getting oil when they need it.
According to a report on The Economist, “The price of oil may soon hit $200 a barrel—or so, at any rate, believes Shokri Ghanem, Libya’s oil minister. A few years ago such a prediction would have seemed absurd. But the price has doubled in the past year and has risen by 40% this year alone.” The report also said that the demand for oil is rising sharply in contrast with production. Global demand, meanwhile, continues to rise, thanks to an ever-increasing thirst for oil in fast-growing developing countries such as China and India. Their increased consumption is more than compensating for falling demand for oil in rich countries.”
“Our economy and way of life – especially in sprawling, car-crazy North Texas – depends on a steady and affordable supply of oil. It can’t last, because oil is not an infinite resource. We might not be at the end of the cheap oil era yet, but when that day comes, its dawn will look something like what we’re living through today,” states an editorial in the Dallas Morning News. Who would have thought that Americans will consider changing their lifestyle based on market conditions such as oil? I still remember President Bush boasting about driving big SUV. It never occurred to me that one day I will have to ‘plan’ my driving. One of the great benefits of living in the United States is the freedom to move around. If you wanted to go somewhere, you just go. If you felt like moving, gasoline and inflation was not the reason stopping you. It was the America, where little things could not affect us. We all thought (as people always do) that bad economy won’t happen to us. And like all the other nations we learned that no one is invincible.
Uh-oh: Alaska governor lied about polar bears
Bad news, reported by Tom Kizzia from the McClatchy Washington Bureau. The GOP really hates polar bears, doesn’t it? The story:
A newly released e-mail from last fall shows that Alaska’s own biologists were at odds with the administration of Gov. Sarah Palin, which has consistently opposed any new federal protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act.
The state’s in-house dispute seems to refute later statements by Gov. Sarah Palin that a “comprehensive review” of the federal science by state wildlife officials found no reason to support an endangered-species listing for the northern bears. The governor invoked the state’s own scientific work both in a cover letter to the state’s official polar bear comments, and in an opinion piece published in the New York Times.
But the Oct. 9 e-mail, which was released this month to a University of Alaska scientist who had filed a public records request seeking information on the state’s polar bear decision-making, shows that the head of the marine mammals program for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and two other staff biologists agreed with the conclusions of nine polar bear studies that the federal government was citing to justify a threatened-species listing for the bears.
“Overall, we believe that the methods and analytical approaches used to examine the currently available information supports the primary conclusions and inferences stated in these 9 reports,” Robert Small wrote.
Alaska officials have expressed concern that a threatened-species listing gives environmentalists more leverage to oppose oil and gas development in Arctic Alaska and poses risks to Native subsistence. The state’s efforts to raise contrary scientific arguments have been met with derision by some environmentalists, who liken it to efforts from the tobacco industry to raise questions about the dangers of smoking and delay regulatory action.
Read the full story at adn.com.
Mindfulness meditation in therapy
Extremely interesting article by Benedict Carey in the NY Times today:
The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father.
“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”
The therapist nodded.
“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”
“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”
This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.
For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”
The price of the Surge
The price, not in lives, but in the political situation in Iraq: whether the Surge made the country more (or less) stable. An interesting and important article in Foreign Affairs by Steven Simon, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director for Transnational Threats. The summary:
he Bush administration’s new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely — by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.
The article itself begins:
In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach to the war in Iraq. At the time, sectarian and insurgent violence appeared to be spiraling out of control, and Democrats in Washington — newly in control of both houses of Congress — were demanding that the administration start winding down the war. Bush knew he needed to change course, but he refused to, as he put it, “give up the goal of winning.” So rather than acquiesce to calls for withdrawal, he decided to ramp up U.S. efforts. With a “surge” in troops, a new emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, and new commanders overseeing that strategy, Bush declared, the deteriorating situation could be turned around.
More than a year on, a growing conventional wisdom holds that the surge has paid off handsomely. U.S. casualties are down significantly from their peak in mid-2007, the level of violence in Iraq is lower than at any point since 2005, and Baghdad seems the safest it has been since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime five years ago. Some backers of the surge even argue that the Iraqi civil war is over and that victory on Washington’s terms is in sight — so long as the United States has the will to see its current efforts through to their conclusion.
Unfortunately, such claims misconstrue the causes of the recent fall in violence and, more important, ignore a fatal flaw in the strategy. The surge has changed the situation not by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments: the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.
Despite the current lull in violence, Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq’s cohesion. That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle.
Bush definition of “transparency”
Excellent article by Arthur Allen in the Washington Independent, which begins:
The Bush administration has a pet word to describe its regulatory policy. The word is “transparent.” Last Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency chief Stephen Johnson used it to describe an ozone ruling in which the White House at the last minute reversed EPA recommendations for limiting smog. “It’s been a very transparent process,” Johnson told Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Ca.) and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
At a House Science subcommittee hearing the next day, Susan Dudley, the top White House regulatory officer with the Office of Management and Budget, used it in reference to EPA’s toxic chemical regulations. Critics, including the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, claimed that toxics assessment had been paralyzed by new EPA guidelines that allow the Pentagon, industry and other actors to stop EPA evaluation of toxics without offering any rationale. “OMB,” Dudley said, “supports EPA’s efforts to provide greater transparency.”
To most of us, “transparent” means something you can see into. If the ozone regulations were transparent, for example, one might expect that President George W. Bush would explain why he overturned EPA’s scientific evidence-based recommendations. When brought up to describe toxics regulation, “transparent” might mean that the public could see the paper trail providing the scientific justification behind it.
But the White House seems to have found another definition of “transparent.” It means a process that the White House can see into.
Take the case of ozone.
Good catch!
John McCain’s argument against improving the GI Bill is that offering good benefits to service members who leave after one tour will make it harder to develop the cadre of long-service non-coms that is the backbone of any fighting force. Commenter “oddball” on the WaPo politics blog makes a point I hadn’t thought of in this regard: if it’s a bad idea to tempt potential non-coms away from the service by paying their college tuition, why is it a good idea to let Blackwater and other mercenary companies tempt them away by offering them six-figure salaries, which will eventually be billed through to the taxpayers with overhead added?
“Oddball” also asks a question:
Could that have anything to do with the fact that McCain’s campaign is run by uber-lobbyist Charlie Black, who has long represented Blackwater in Washington?
CEOs in the Netherlands
The Dutch have a good idea (and thanks to Jack for pointing it out). Sam Pizzigati explains:
The Netherlands now seems to have a new claim to fame. The land of dikes, tulips, and Vermeer may now host the world’s unhappiest corporate CEOs. What’s making the Dutch execs so unhappy? These captains of industry run some of the world’s biggest companies. Yet they’re taking home just a quarter of what their counterparts in the United States are making.
The worst part of all: The Dutch people think Dutch executives are making too much. And the Dutch people aren’t just complaining about executive pay. They’re pressing lawmakers to do something. Amazingly, lawmakers are.
The Dutch parliament, observers believe, will shortly enact into law legislation that will heavily tax American-style executive windfalls — and maybe set some global precedents.
Other European nations, news reports indicate, are already taking notice. Earlier this month, in Brussels, European Union finance ministers “applauded” Wouter Bos, the Dutch finance minister who’s leading his nation’s charge against executive excess. The chair of the Brussels session, Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, called the “bloated payouts” going to corporate executives “a social scourge.”
The legislation that Bos is pushing in the Netherlands will impose a 30 percent tax on all executive severance packages that run over 500,000 euros, the equivalent of almost $800,000. Last year, the CEO of the top Dutch baby food maker exited his executive suite with $124 million, a windfall that outraged the Dutch public.
Is this going to be us?
From Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing:
Academics at the UK’s Nottingham University were arrested as terrorists for downloading Al Qaeda documents from a US government server in the course of research into a Master’s degree convering terrorist tactics. The two UK-born profs were released, but the student faces deportation to Algeria under the Terrorism Act, where he believes he will be tortured. The university — which encouraged its staffers to rat out people they thought were involved in researching terrorism — refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong with any of this.
Despite his Nottingham University supervisors insisting the materials were directly relevant to his research, Rizwaan Sabir, 22, was held for nearly a week under the Terrorism Act, accused of downloading the materials for illegal use. The student had obtained a copy of the al-Qaida training manual from a US government website for his research into terrorist tactics.The case highlights what lecturers are claiming is a direct assault on academic freedom led by the government which, in its attempt to establish a “prevent agenda” against terrorist activity, is putting pressure on academics to become police informers.
Sabir was arrested on May 14 after the document was found by a university staff member on an administrator’s computer. The administrator, Hisham Yezza, an acquaintance of Sabir, had been asked by the student to print the 1,500-page document because Sabir could not afford the printing fees. The pair were arrested under the Terrorism Act, Sabir’s family home was searched and their computer and mobile phones seized. They were released uncharged six days later but Yezza, who is Algerian, was immediately rearrested on unrelated immigration charges and now faces deportation.
Corruption at the border
The NY Times has a lengthy article on how corruption has spread within Customs and Border Protection, with many in the Border Patrol and many Customs agents let pass persons and items that should be intercepted. As Andrew Tilghman comments in today’s TPMMuckraker “Must Read”:
Federal officials say their decision to dissolve the Internal Affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection unit a few years ago was a bad idea (go figure), and now the Department of Homeland Security is reconstituting it. Reborn with a whopping five investigators last year, the unit is projected to grow to 200 by the end of this year.
The Bush Administration simply has no understanding of how to run the agencies they’re ruining.
“That was then…”
From Jim Rutenberg at the NY Times:
… Howard Wolfson, a strategist for Mrs. Clinton, also pointed out on Monday that some had called for her to leave the race early in the process.
“Senator Obama’s supporters in the media began calling on Senator Clinton to drop out as early as February,” Mr. Wolfson said. “This is one of the closest nominating contests in American history, and the constant calls for Senator Clinton to quit are unwarranted and inappropriate.”
Yet the Clinton campaign in 1992 used some of the same tactics that Mrs. Clinton and her supporters now decry, like declaring the nomination secure early and encouraging party leaders and the news media to climb on board.
The Democratic primary
Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker has an excellent analysis of the current Democratic presidential primary:
… In the current Presidential primary campaign, as in the Electoral College, the “popular vote” has no official significance. According to the Party’s rules, the nomination will go to whoever can garner a majority of the delegates at the Convention in Denver, regardless of how many voters or caucus-goers sent them there, or didn’t. (The so-called superdelegates, who make up a fifth of the Convention, represent voters only in the highly attenuated sense of having earlier won public or party office.) Yet the popular vote, however juridically meaningless, carries immense moral and political weight with Democrats, for whom the 2000 travesty is a station of the cross and vote-counting a kind of sacrament. The superdelegates understand this. That’s why it has been clear all along that if one of the candidates is able to claim an indisputable majority of actual flesh-and-blood Democrats it will be difficult to deny him—or her—the nomination. But what if the majority is highly disputable, and everybody has one?
“We’re winning the popular vote,” Hillary Clinton said last week, after prevailing in the Kentucky primary by a margin bigger than that by which she lost in Oregon. “More people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination.” These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband’s descriptions of his personal entanglements. They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either.
In a nominating process, especially this one, the “popular vote” is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them. With or without participants in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington (i.e., states where voters’ preferences were expressed by gathering in corners and the like, and whose numbers can be estimated but are not pinpointed), and with the totals for both Florida (whose primary was unsanctioned by the Democratic Party, with the consent of all the candidates, and where no one campaigned) and Michigan (also unsanctioned, and where Obama’s name was not even on the ballot), Clinton’s claim that more people have “voted” for her is factual. But her claim to be “ahead” depends entirely on a tally for the Michigan primary that is distinctly North Korean: Clinton, 328,309; Obama, 0. However, if the bulk of the 238,168 Michiganders who voted “uncommitted” are assumed to have been Obama supporters—a reasonable assumption—then Obama leads by every possible reckoning. And if only Florida is included, then Obama leads whether or not those four caucuses are counted.
“I regret” = “I apologize”?
I got to thinking more about the nature of the typical political apology, and after watching the video I posted earlier, I did recall that the use of “regret” instead of “apologize” is common. Are they the same?
“I regret” is a statement of one’s feelings. Examples
- I regret soaking that last bite in habanero sauce.
- I regret lashing out in anger at my boss.
- I regret spending all my money on candy, and I especially regret eating it all at one sitting.
- I regret what I said to you.
All those statements are about my own feelings and the object of “regret,” direct or indirect, is not anyone else.
“I apologize” has as an indirect object (often understood) another person: one apologizes to someone. I can write in my journal that “I regret what I said” and it makes perfect sense, but it makes no sense to write there “I apologize for what I said.” Apologies are expressed to another person. Examples:
- I apologize for soaking that last bite in habanero sauce [makes no sense---action not related to another person].
- I apologize [to you] for lashing out in anger.
- I apologize for spending all my money on candy [makes no sense unless another person is somehow involved and is the recipient of the apology].
- I apologize [to you] for saying that.
So “I regret saying that” and “I apologize for saying that” have very different meanings. A regret is not an apology, even if it sounds a little like one. A regret is an inadequate substitute for an apology. The regret for saying something signifies “I said that and I wish I hadn’t” but no one is receiving an apology with that statement.
